Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

Ephraim Beck’s Mystery Bookstore has operated in the same location for over one hundred years. It has not always been exclusively a mystery-book store. It has, on the other hand, always been owned by the Beck family. The Becks are something of a local myth in Quinsigamond — the bloodline cursed with the incurable affliction of bibliomania.

Ezekiel Beck, Ephraim’s grandfather, started the store around 1890, according to the myth, when his Victorian home was structurally threatened by the sheer weight of his library. He was a genuine book nut, manuscript mad, addicted to bound paper and ink. The floors of his house were buckling, the walls beginning to bulge. His wife warned of divorce and scandal. Zeke quit his growing law practice, moved the family to the second and third floors of the house, and set up shop on the first. His logic was that this would stabilize and maybe even reduce the number of volumes under his roof.

He did not physically alter the family home in any way. In some instances, he did not even bother to move furniture. The dining room, for instance, was turned into the philosophy section, and Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the rest overran the tables, china cabinets, and buffet. The pantry was devoted to poetry, and Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Whitman lined the shelves that had housed sugar and flour and coffee. The small music alcove was crammed with theology. The front parlor loaded with contemporary fiction, a rolltop proprietor’s desk, and a tin-scrolled cash register.

Ephraim, the grandson and last of the bloodline, fifty years old now and still a bachelor, lives in three rooms on the second floor of the house. The top floor is used for storage. And the first floor, still outfitted in its original Victorian decor, houses an extensive and often idiosyncratic collection of mystery literature, from rare Poe first editions to fading pulp paperbacks. Ephraim switched to an exclusively mystery stock the week after his father died. He issues a catalogue twice a year that he mails to customers “as far away as Melbourne.”

Now, drinking a European tea spiked with a cheap rye, Ike studies Ephraim’s attire and attempts to calm himself. Whenever he’s rattled, Ike has found that an hour’s browse through the rooms of Ephraim’s home will settle him down, give him perspective. He has known Ephraim for almost ten years and he has recently given up on determining if his chronic manner of dress — black wool pants, threadbare white shirt with tiny turn-down collar, maroon suspenders, maroon bow tie, cowl-collared grey cardigan — is natural or an affectation, a manifestation of Ephraim’s idea of how an eccentric Yankee bookseller, feigning pennilessness, would dress. Now, when Ephraim lights up a bowlful of tobacco in one of his grandfather’s ancient, hand-carved pipes, Ike just smiles and takes in the pleasant smell of apples.

Over the years they have engaged in hundreds of hours of battle over the merits of the classical English puzzle-box mysteries of the elite class versus the more character-oriented morality plays of the desperate American individual. Ephraim is the Anglophile. Ike, surprisingly, likes his book crimes hard-boiled and urban. Neither one of them knows what to make of the new wave of déco noir books from France where there is no hero, little plot, and just page after page of random, bizarre violence.

“Did you try the book idea out on your sister yet?” Ephraim asks offhandedly, jamming a felt cleaner into the end of one of the pipes.

“Haven’t found the right moment,” Ike says.

The shop just isn’t having the calming effect today. He feels jittery, tentative. His lungs feel constricted. He should have taken the mutilated fish as an omen.

A phone upstairs begins to ring and Ephraim pulls himself out of his chair and starts up the stairs, saying to Ike, “Tend the shop for a second.”

Ike finishes his tea and rye with a single, long swallow, then gets up and starts to pace. Eventually, he begins to walk in a large circle through the whole of the first floor, dining room to pantry to kitchen to parlor to music alcove to living room to front hall, back to the dining room. He wonders as he walks what it must have been like to grow up in a house that was literally filled, wall-to-wall, with books. Do you end up appreciating them in a way that the average person cannot? Or do you take them for granted, expect their continued presence the way debutantes expect money and attention?

He moves through the circle again, pausing this time in the parlor, inspecting, again, all the first editions inside the nowantique, glass-door mahogany bookcase that rises as high as the eleven-foot ceilings. Most of the books in the case have been for sale as long as Ike has been coming to the shop. They’re very high priced, mint collector’s quality, fairly rare. Ike has suggested that Ephraim alarm the store for the sake of these volumes alone. He stares at the spines of the ones he’d love to possess, reads the authors’ names — Chesterton, Collins, Hornung, Futrelle, Morley.

Ike takes a step back from the case, stands silent, and listens. He rarely gets moments alone like this and though he knows Ephraim wouldn’t be pleased, he tells himself that possibly handling one of these treasures might turn things around for him, salvage the day a bit. Besides, his hands are clean and all the money he’s spent in the shop should entitle him to at least hold the first edition of Red Harvest for a minute.

He slowly pulls open one of the doors and is impressed by its weight. He reaches in and pulls down a Chesterton— The Club of Queer Trades. Written in 1905, Ike guesses, and opens the volume to prove himself right. He hears Ephraim move upstairs, gets nervous, slides the book back into place on the shelf, and closes the case door. He hasn’t felt this kind of jumpiness since he stopped taking that asthma medication fifteen years ago.

He walks into the huge kitchen, lined recently with library-style shelving to create cramped mini-aisles. Ephraim has pulled the “True Crime” section out of the basement where it was getting a little musty, and given it a full aisle in the kitchen. Ike browses it now and just the names off the spines make him uneasy. They’re all here, all the famous and most depraved murderers in the collective history of our worst fears — Torquemada, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Richard Speck, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and, of course, Manson. Manson gets almost an entire shelf to himself.

Ike does not read true-crime books. He doesn’t see the entertainment, can’t understand how someone could squeeze any enjoyment out of them. But he continually browses them, pulls them down off the shelf and studies the dust jackets. Sometimes he’ll force himself to open to the photographs and take a quick peek. It’s become a small test he makes himself endure every few visits to the shop.

He settles now on a title he’s never seen before: Matamoros— Devil’s Playland. It’s a fat volume, maybe two inches wide at the spine and jacketed in glossy black with blood-red block lettering. Ike would bet his life that there are plenty of photos and more than one will be ridiculously lurid.

He reaches up and grabs the volume, pulls it out from its neighbors with a little effort, and lets out a shocked scream. Through the space left between the books he can see Eva’s head.

Eva screams back at him.

Ephraim’s feet come running across the upstairs floor and he’s yelling, “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

Eva comes around to Ike’s aisle and they face each other, breathing like they’ve finished sprinting a lap around the city.

“For Christ sake,” Ike heaves.